[Destroyer]

(RW, Willy, CaptP and Lumber, this is a great one for the Shrewsbury River)

Sorry, no pics of this, but something I do for bait for the spring Flounder run is make my own chum logs. Before you could buy package goods in bars in NJ you had to buy beer in a take out container. The container was a round can made of white cardboard with a lid that fit over the top and was one quart size. A lot of food places still use the half quart size for hot take out soup. Most bars still have them available, as well as chinese food places (rice) and lots of other places (soup). The trick is to find a source for them. (There's a place not far from me in my town that actually makes them, so that's where I get mine.) Once you do you can make your own chum logs. I cook rice, mix it with mackrel or blue fish ground up in my Grandmothers old hand meat grinder, add some cat food and niblets corn. Mix the whole mess up and pack it into those paper cans and put them in the freezer over the winter.

Come springtime, the water warms a little and the flounder wake up and come up out of the mud in the rivers where they were burried during the winter. You take one of those chum logs, peel the paper off the hard frozen log and put it in a chum pot you hang over the side of your boat. The beauty is that the chum log is exactly the same size as your standard chum pot, so it just fits in nicely while frozen without a lot of mess getting all over your hands or the boat. It will take several hours for the really cold river water to thaw out the log, and while it's doing that the natural rocking of the boat on the water is shaking tiny little pieces off the main frozen body and making a beautiful chum slick that the flounder follow right up to your baited hook(s). It's just a little thing, but it saves tons of time and cleanup and gives you more time for fishing.